Monday, October 17, 2011

The 2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award for Services to the Python
Community has been awarded to Georg Brandl.

Georg has been a core contributor to CPython since 2005, contributing bug
fixes for compiler internals and modules such as pdb. His most
widely known contributions are to Python's documentation, through
writing as well as by creating and maintaining the Sphinx tool chain
for converting reStructuredText input files to more easily consumed
formats such as HTML and PDF.

Making Documentation Easier

Earlier versions of Python used LaTeX and a Perl-based tool-chain to
convert documentation into HTML and PDF. The reliance on Perl, and
the relative difficulty of contributing to LaTeX-formatted source
files, came up from time to time, but Georg was the one to finally
take on the problem of building the necessary tools to manage the
content in another format, and then converting all of the existing
files.

Georg studied the docutils project and decided that it met most of
the requirements, but needed a few custom markup features and a tool
to convert individual input files to a unified output document. He
wrote a tool called "doctools" for Python's documentation, which was
eventually re-christened to Sphinx "because of the build tool for
python.org, which was called Pyramid -- and unhappily without regard
to the two existing projects called Sphinx."

Over time, the user base for Sphinx grew beyond CPython's
documentation team, and Georg continues to work with other
contributors to make it more generally useful for other projects. For
example, some of the Python-centric features have been reorganized
with the recent addition of the "domains" system, allowing Sphinx to
be used for projects written in C, Java, and other languages just as
easily as Python.

When I asked him about Sphinx, Georg said,

Today I'm very happy and very proud of what the community has done
for documentation, also thanks to Sphinx: while Python itself always
had excellent docs, now extensive and usable docs are basically a
trademark of the whole Python community (just look at ReadTheDocs
or packages.python.org).

About Georg

Georg is a PhD student of Physics. He works at the Munich research
reactor slash neutron source on magnetism, researching novel materials
for the computing of tomorrow. He uses Python to control experiments
consisting of dozens of individual devices, and for teaching other
scientists how to do so efficiently. When he is not working on
Python-related projects, Georg likes to cycle and to cook.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Python Software Foundation gave the recent PyTexas conference US$750 in funds.

About the Conference

PyTexas 2011 was the fourth annual free Python programming conference in Texas. It took place Saturday, September 10 - Sunday, September 2011 at the Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. They have a blog that has some photos from the conference on it. All of the talks at PyTexas were recorded and are starting to appear on NextDayVideo and Miro. If you would like to help plan next year's conference, you can join the PyTexas mailing list.

They estimate about 170 people attended PyTexas 2011, up from 94 at PyTexas 2010, and 22 at PyTexas 2009.

Call for Proposals

Last year set records for attendance and talk submissions, and the
conference organizers are looking forward to an even bigger and better
conference this year. Anyone, whether hobbyist or professional
programmer, can propose a talk, tutorial, or poster. The call for
proposals includes recommendations for creating a good submission.

About PyCon 2012

PyCon 2012 will be held in Santa Clara, California, from March 7 - 15.
The conference itself runs March 9 - 11 with two days of tutorials
preceding the conference, and four days of sprints following.

The Python Software Foundation has presented a Community Service
Award for the second quarter of 2011 to Laura Creighton in recognition of her continuous efforts
in making community events happen, and especially for her work with
the PyPy team.

Please join us in thanking Laura for her contributions to the
community.